


How the Helican

by Deejaymil



Series: Paddling in the Ambient Magic Pool [1]
Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce, PIERCE Tamora - Works
Genre: Fishing, Gen, Nobody can like a pelican, Pelicans, Short & Sweet, ambient magic, feathers - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:34:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24639997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: Everybody was hungry, even the pelicans.
Series: Paddling in the Ambient Magic Pool [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1781581
Comments: 8
Kudos: 21





	How the Helican

**Author's Note:**

> Short prompt fills to explore the concept of what ambient Emelan-style magic would look like with the animals in the Circle universe! There'll probably be more to come, this was a ton of fun and I bet this looks completely different depending on the animal.
> 
> Title from the 1910 limerick by Dixon Lanier Merritt:
>
>> A wonderful bird is the pelican,  
> His bill will hold more than his belican,  
> He can take in his beak  
> Food enough for a week,  
> But I'm damned if I see how the helican

The fish had stopped coming to Pelican Bay. Everyone was saying it was just a matter of time before they returned, but Walvis looked at the worry on his mum and his dad and knew that everyone was lying to make everyone else feel better. With no fish, there was no food, no trade, no goods to take inland to sell at the bigger settlements. The Bay had a water mage there, Nana Balcott, but she said there was nothing the water could tell her about where the fish were going.

And everyone was hungry, even the pelicans.

Walvis worried that they’d one day fly away and there wouldn’t be anything left here but hungry people and a fading place. He’d always dreamed of flying away himself, staring out over the water as the fishing fleets pulled out with their sails thrust proudly towards that limitless horizon. The ocean called to him, to something deep inside that longed to glide above the waves as the boats did. But in his dreams and his wishing, he’d always had a home to come back to at the end of his long voyages. None of his dreams involved starving.

They were talking about someone going inland to get one of the academic mages from the big universities to come out and see if there was something bad happening when the pelican man came. He came in the night and no one knew he was there, except Walvis, who was sitting at the beach watching the pelicans scoop their great, long beaks fruitlessly through empty waters.

“This water is hurting,” said the man, appearing beside Walvis without his bare feet making a sound on the loose pebbles of the beach. Walvis gasped, leaping up to stare at the man, who in turn was staring out at the shaggy white shapes of the pelicans. “Can you feel it, sad fella?”

“Me?” Walvis looked out as the water as the man nodded, his brown eyes amused. “I don’t feel much. I don’t have magic with water. You want Nana Bal –”

“Nah, old Nana, I know her. She thinks like a person. This water doesn’t need people thinking like it to help it. See the birds – they’re still here. They could fly away anytime, but they haven’t. Why’s that?”

Walvis didn’t know.

“Why haven’t you flown away?” pressed the man.

He had crouched beside Walvis, his bandy knees thick with callouses. His feet were thickened as well. Walvis knew by looking at him and the salt stained deep into his dark skin and his well-worn feet that this was a man who wouldn’t be bothered at all by walking across the sharp rocks where the pelicans roosted, something Walvis could do but his sisters couldn’t. There was a bag hanging from the man’s thin shoulder, which he rooted through now, scattered what was within onto the rocks. Feathers and pebbles and white bits of what looked like eggshell. There was string too, knotted in interesting patterns and twined with more feathers still, and as Walvis watched with fascination he saw the man carefully moving large, white eggs around.

“Well?”

Walvis didn’t know what to say except, “This is my home.”

That seemed to be enough.

“Take this,” said the man, giving Walvis some of those feathers. They felt warm and alive in Walvis’s hand, despite not being attached to the living bird. Almost familiar, but not quite. And there was magic in them, Walvis knew instantly. This mess of feather and string and eggshell and rocks – this was a mage’s kit, an impossible, fantastical mage’s kit. “You feel it, don’t you? The magic. You’ve got it too. There’s something out there that’s got its hooks in you good, waiting for you to realise and go to it. You watch me now.”

Walvis watched.

“This spell isn’t for people’s knowing,” the mage warned Walvis, who nodded. He knew that already. These feathers, after all, weren’t from people. “I’ll bring the fish back for the pelicans, and the people too if they share, but the fish won’t stay. Homes sometimes change, to let the land breathe again. You understand?”

Walvis did.

The mage selected particular feathers from his kit, winding them into the netting in a careful, studious fashion. As he went, he explained – this one for calling, this one for hunger. This one for flight and wind, because both those things interact with the currents, and the currents interact with the fish and knowing a creature’s magic meant knowing how it intersected with everything else.

“It’s not like being tricky with plants or rocks,” the mage explained, “you’ve got to think deeper about it. The magic wants to work with you, but the creature’s magic doesn’t care a whit about you. You gotta join them, like this.”

And he _scooped._

That was the only explanation for what he did to the magic Walvis was feeling, for what he felt the world do in response. It billowed out like a hungry beak, swallowing all the different threads of magic interacting in the quiet bay and, briefly and for a single weightless second, tugging them with intent to a single goal: to fill hungry bellies. The pelicans, floating out there watching with interest, put their intent behind it too, but only so much because they had bellies wanting feeding too, not because they cared for this mage who used their magic so freely.

“You saw all that,” said the man, sounding very satisfied. Walvis nodded, distracted by watching the ocean beginning to bubble as fish from outside the bay swept in, churning at the surface in a frenzy to feed at what the mage had pulled up from the tired ocean floor to satiate them. “When your people move off to let this place breathe, you come look for me, hey? I can show you a thing or two about flying.”

“I don’t have pelican magic,” said Walvis, knowing it was true. Whatever was inside him, it was different. It wasn’t as greedy and exciting, and he knew innately he could never scoop all different kinds of magic together like that.

But the mage just winked. He dug around in his bag more and selected one of those eggs, handing it to Walvis. The egg was light. Hollowed out, but not empty. As soon as Walvis took it in two hands, recognising the coarse, oval egg as being pelican eggs, of course, he knew it was filled with a growing magic, still infantile and thoughtful.

“Put some of what you’ve got in here,” said the mage, jabbed Walvis’s chest, “in there, every sunrise. It’ll grow with you. Listen to it sometimes, against your ear. Like a shell. It’ll tell you one day what you’ve got. Then you come find me. And Walvis?”

Walvis, momentarily thrown by this man knowing his name, just stared dumbly at him instead of saying yes, or thank you, or ‘How will I find you?’

The mage, with a grin, said, “You tell your daddy that his brother says hi.”


End file.
